Ninjas rarely let go of secrets of the universe. It’s universally looked down upon, much like the way a magician explains how he levitated himself or cut his girlfriend in half.

But I’m going to let you in on a little secret – everyone has to grow up at some point. It’s true. Little kids turn into grown-ups. Baby ninjas (or binjas) grow up to be adult ninjas (though you’d never know since you never see them). Pups grow into full size shedding dogs. Even seedlings turn into the beans that are roasted for the cup of coffee that inspired this blog post. And before you ask, yes, indeed, The Embedded Ninja enjoys his own cup of coffee.

Upon landing at one of the multiple airports I travel to in pursuit of my customer interactions, I spent the first sixty seconds upon reaching the terminal searching for a coffee stand. I placed an order and paid my way (on an embedded POS system incidentally), and ninja-ed my way over to the pick-up area. Glancing around the terminal, the first thing I saw blew my mind and I had to grab a snapshot. You can see the snapshot for yourself. Let’s break this down...

Much of what we highlight on the Approaching Embedded Intelligently blog is about what we’re doing as the Windows Embedded team. However, much of what we create is just a platform, it takes our partners and customers to really create something great. I’m planning on taking some more time in the future to discover and highlight great examples of Windows Embedded in action. Today’s post is not a device running Windows Embedded, but is instead an extremely useful tool from Wolfgang Unger, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Windows Embedded. In addition to being an MVP, Wolfgang is a Windows Embedded, Microsoft, and device enthusiast. In his role at Elbacom he provides technical support and advice to customers about Windows Embedded, produces content for the Elbacom website, and writes the Embedded Magazine produced by Elbacom. In his free time he enjoys working on home automation and his car PC. All-in-all, Wolfgang is a fantastic Windows Embedded Partner and has received Microsoft’s Award of Excellence and Developer of the Year awards.

If you’re an Embedded developer or need to manage any Windows systems in your enterprise, you’re likely aware of the Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool, or DISM. DISM is used to manage the features and technologies on Windows devices. For Windows Embedded, this is a very important tool because it enables you to change the composition of an image outside of Image Configuration Editor (ICE) or Image Builder Wizard (IBW). You can run DISM locally on the target image in what is called “Online” mode, or can run it on a captured .wim file in “Offline” mode.

Traditional DISM experience

DISM is extremely powerful and, as far as command-line applications go, it’s not too difficult to use. However, it’s not the same as having a nice interface that would guide you through the process and make adding and removing content from your image really easy to understand. With DISMUI, Wolfgang did just that and more.

I’ve seen a number of questions in some of the forums about how to get started with Windows Embedded Compact from the perspective of running (hosting) the actual OS image created with Platform Builder (PB). PB makes it easy to design and create an embedded OS image, but you still need to be able to load and execute that image – typically on a piece of hardware.. Virtual PCs are great as a Windows Embedded Compact development tool since they don’t actually require new hardware. Virtual machine use with Windows Embedded Compact really falls into two categories: hosting an OS image and hosting PB itself. The one I’ll cover today is hosting an embedded OS image, built with PB, in a Virtual PC rather than on an actual device.

The new updates included in this download can be applied directly to runtime images. The componentized versions of these update for updating the database will be included in next month’s security update release. The database updates incorporate all security updates from prior months for the current year; therefore you do not need to install previous security database updates.